Tag: fatima

How popular is the baby name Fatima in the United States right now? How popular was it historically? Find out using the graph below! Plus, see baby names similar to Fatima and check out all the blog posts that mention the name Fatima.

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The baby names Teresa and Fatima might see higher usage in 2016 and 2017, respectively, thanks to Catholic influence.

Teresa

On September 4, 2016, Mother Teresa will officially be declared a saint of the Catholic Church.

Mother Teresa’s religious name honors St. Thérèse de Lisieux, but she opted for the Spanish spelling “Teresa” when she took her religious vows (back in 1931) because another nun in the convent was already using the name “Thérèse.”

Her birth name was Anjezë, an Albanian form of Agnes, which can be traced back to the Ancient Greek word hagnos, meaning “pure, chaste.”

Fatima

Next year marks the 100th anniversary of the Marian apparitions seen by three shepherd children (Lúcia, Francisco, and Jacinta) near the town of Fátima, Portugal.

The place name Fátima is based on the Arabic personal name Fatimah, meaning “to wean.”

If the usage of Fatima does rise in the U.S. in 2017, I’ll be curious to see how much of that increase comes from states with large Portuguese populations (like Massachusetts, California, and Rhode Island).

Sayali Sadiqova, deputy chairperson of Azerbaijan’s Terminology Commission, has been in the news twice recently talking about baby names.

She mentioned in one article that the top baby names in Azerbaijan are Ali, Hasan and Huseyn for boys and Fatima and Zeyneb for girls. She also noted that Azerbaijani parents tend to prefer religious baby names to non-religious baby names.

In the other, she said that the government had been receiving requests to use “strange names” such as Newton, Galileo, Ingilis (meaning “English”), and Frunze (refers to Bolshevik military leader Mikhail Frunze). She stated that there was “a definitive ban on these names,” and that hundreds of such names had been banned already.

In the past, the Terminology Commission has also taken issue with Russian baby names, Russian-sounding baby names, baby names influenced by Soviet ideology, Armenian baby names, and more.

Authorities in China’s Hotan prefecture (which is part of the far west Xinjiang Autonomous Region) have recently banned 22 specific Muslim baby names in “an apparent bid to discourage extremism among the region’s Uyghur residents.”

In fact, Beijing has long been restricting the rights of the mostly-Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uyghurs, which make up the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang (45% of the population).

And the name-ban doesn’t just apply to babies. It also applies to young children who already have these names. Uyghurs in the region have told reporters that “authorities were forbidding children whose parents did not change their names from attending kindergarten and elementary school.”

According to Ilshat Hesen, vice president of the Uyghur American Association in Washington, D.C., the name ban is a “violation of human rights, and an example of Chinese authorities’ extreme assimilation policy for Muslim Uyghurs.”

Earlier this month, the Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) of Dubai — one of the 7 emirates in the UAE — released lists of popular girl names and boy names according to a survey of school registration records. I’m not sure what age range the records covered, but these lists were also topped by Maryam and Mohammed:

Girl Names

Boy Names

1. Maryam
2. Sara/Sarah
3. Fatima/Fatma
4. Ayesha
5. Noor

1. Mohammed
2. Ali
3. Omar
4. Ahmed/Ahmad
5. Abdulla/Abdullah

One Dubai student named Mohammed was quoted as saying, “It is common to see four or five students share Mohammed as their first name in a class of 25 to 30 students. We usually get called by our second name.”